大象传媒

Then when I got home Rene had heard that there was a job going at Middlesbrough Dock with British Railway on the dock. I applied for it and was given an interview and got the job so I decided to leave the sea altogether and I started work for the Docks Board I think it was March 1946 as Dock Gate Foreman. I was there four years.
When we had no house to lie in we were living with Rene鈥檚 parents and John was born then. Things got a bit hairy at home, Lily was there she couldn't put up with us and a man about the house and the disturbance we were creating because it must have been a disturbance, must have been a real disturbance from three women to a family there it must have been a real disturbance. One thing that always tickles me was, one day, one night Lily came in from going down the yard to the toilet absolutely livid apparently I had been there before her and lifted the seat up and left it up she sat down she wondered what had bit her. Well anyway things got a bit hairy then they started this squatting and Rene and her mother went up to the squatters camp and grabbed a hut. It was a very nice hut, it wasn't very big, but it was big enough for us. They grabbed this hut and sat in it, and when I came home I had to go and help. We lived there I just forget how long we lived there. Certainly more than a year because Ann was born there and they were happy times because there was just the two or three of us together and they were happy times. We I got on I did quite a lot of odd jobs and one thing and another. Started learning a bit of joinery

Anyway the council made them somewhat habitable and as I say we weren't doing badly. And then the chance came for a house at Brambles farm near Brambles farm. Once again Rene and her mother started it, started the ball rolling went and looked at it, had a look at it and more or less told me "Get cracking" I had to be pushed but once I saw the point in what they were doing saw the reasoning behind it I went in for it wholehearted and we eventually bought this house at Brambles farm, near the Brambles farm Inn Middlesbrough. The interest rate on the mortgage was two and a quarter percent and it could not be varied it did not matter what the interest rate did that remained the same two and a quarter percent can you imagine it today! Anyway we bought this house we were there quite a while and then I was promoted to West Hartlepool which meant that we had to more. So we sold that house and bought a house at Seaton Carew. Well when we saw it, it was a beautiful house.

On the Thurso when the steering broke and a big ware came one of the lifeboats was destroyed, the other was dipping into the water all the time as the ship was rolling so we let that go. I was one of them that let it go we got hold of some crew and we went onto the boat deck and got started to let it go and OO! It was cold it was bitterly cold I said come on let us go down the galley and get warmed up so we dived down into the galley and I took my gloves off and laid them on the stove to dry out a bit and when I came to put them on again they had shrunk that much I could not get them anyway near no where near. So it was no gloves from then on. Anyway we went back up onto the boat deck and got the lifeboat away so that meant we had no lifeboats from then on.

Somebody mentioned to me the other day, I was talking, and about the use of paint. Well all the paint we used to use was either, there was lead in it, the re was either white lead, red lead or it was lead based. The white enamel was lead based; every thing was lead based. Very often if it was a suitable thing we were painting we used to put it on with a piece of cloth put the paint on with a piece of cloth over their hands. Today they would be absolutely shocked at handling lead paint in that manner, but that is how we used to do it! When we came to paint the funnel, what we used to have to do was that we had some blocks shoes, pulleys if you like which had a hook on them this hook fitted over the top lip of the funnel and fitted these in and attached the bosun's chair somebody pulled you up right to the very top. With one hand you had to hold yourself up there while with the other hand you brought the rope up up between the bosun鈥檚 chair over your head down under your legs and back up close to the bosun's chair now this may sound simple but the trouble was that the rest of the rope that was hanging down was heavy and when you tried to get sufficient slack with one hand you had a hell of a job struggling to get more slack to go over your head. Once you got it nicely over your head and so far down your back well then you were all right because you had something to knot to let it run back down again. (and) If you let go with your other hand you were down on the deck in a hurry. We used to paint the funnel in that manner, except for the first little bit which was a bit of a stretch to meet up with the other bloke it was a bit of a stretch I will tell you. Apart from that it was a doddle once you got yourself secured because with this particular knot we put in we could lower ourselves. We couldn't lift ourselves but we could lower ourselves to any height we wanted as we were doing the painting and the ships funnel on that particular ship was black funnel with a white band and a red cross, an ordinary plain red cross. Well all the time I was on that ship it was a red cross but afterwards very shortly afterwards the Government forced them to change it and it became a blue cross this was something to do with the International regulations regarding red cross.

On the voyage out usually from England to the Argentine we used to chip and scrape the decks. We used to chip the rust off and scrape it and then cover them with linseed oil and red oxide but I have often wondered since what a futile job. It was because there was still rust there you did not stop the rust we did not do anything it would have been just as easy to have just put the red oxide on and be done with it, give it a bit of a scrape and put the red oxide on because you weren't saving anything you weren't preserving anything. I think it was move a matter of having a job to do. Another job we used to do we the whole of the bridge, bridge house was teak beautiful teak and they used to get us washing this teak down with soda and water, or if it was particularly bad soda and water with lime in it. Now that made caustic soda and it used to play hell with your hands. We used to scrub and scrape this teak and then varnish it. It looked beautiful when it had been varnished for about a week or a fortnight and then it was as bad as ever before once again I couldn't help thinking that it was just a job to keep us busy. I think that they could have found better ways of preserving that teak. It did not need any preserving because teak is oily to start with could have been that there was better ways of doing it.
I think it was more a matter of finding us something to do.
We had quite a few jobs which we used to do which were to my mind thinking over later were really to give us something to do. There wasn't a single part of that ship that I didn't get to at some time with two exceptions one was right on the top, very top, of the mast. We used to call it the truck; right on top of the truck I never got. I painted it but I never got on top of it. The other place was inside the boiler or inside a boiler never went inside a boiler at all. I went everywhere else, in the double bottom tanks in all the tanks; you name it I was there at sometime or other, but never in those positions. The tanks were not very pleasant place talk about claustrophobia it wasn't in it and as I say we used to this entire chipping and scraping but we never chipped and scraped in the tanks.
One episode that happened we were in Liverpool. I don't know which ship it was I think it was the Thurso we were in Liverpool. One night the sirens went and I thought Oh to hell with it. I got ashore and I got up to the pictures just going to go into the pictures when the bombs started to drop so I thought this is no good so I went into an air raid shelter well the place was ruddy awful so I came out wandered around to the pictures again when it started again I thought that this is no good I will have to go into a shelter so I went in this shelter which was St Georges hall in the basement of St Georges hall and there was all sorts of people, mainly women and children in this basement and it was cold, bitterly cold. Anyway half way through the night a bomb was dropped somewhere near hand and all the lights went out and women started screaming, children crying. There was all hell let loose. So they opened another section up and we went further in underneath the building. Stayed there till the raid was over somewhere about 5 o'clock in the morning and then I went back to the ship. I said never again I am not going to go ashore and try and go to the pictures and spend a night like that, bitterly cold and so on in an air raid shelter I would rather take my chance on the ship and I did. The following night on the ship we got some incendiary bombs dropped on us. The ship astern of us was bombed, it sunk in the berth but that wasn't very serious it only settled on the bottom a bit but it dropped the bomb dropped between the quay side and the ships side right close to the galley and then it went off. There was a chap in the galley when they found him he was dead, no clothes on nothing stripped not a mark on him but he was dead.
We were all right except for some incendiary bombs but the ship ahead of us was bombed and damaged and the ship abow of us was bombed and damaged, in that same raid they caught the lock gates and the water in the dock went way down till they could get things under control. At Liverpool what the docks were like there was a little narrow passageway alongside the quay and then the warehouses started solid about 3 stories high the way you got in and out of this little passageway alongside the quay so that you could get aboard the ship and that was through a little alleyway in between the sheds in underneath the sheds. All the sheds around us everyone of them were on fire everyone of them so we got a lifeboat all ready to launch in case we had to do anything about it, we got it all ready just in case. We didn't launch it; we got it all ready just in case. It was quite a hectic night I can tell you we had in all the raids lasted three nights, quite hectic. I don't know what was the result of the raids because you never really got to know there was plenty of bonfires and so on and so forth. Another incident that happened was burning of Bone? And they were coming over and raiding that at nighttime. I don't think that they were really serious raids looking back, but the air raid shelter the re was a tunnel, an operations tunnel underneath they had stored the iron ore which was used to load the ships with they had this great big heap of iron ore and then they had this tunnel through the middle of it. Ore which they drew on for loading the ship. I spent a time down there but again that wasn't very pleasant; I said to hell with it and spent the rest aboard the ship.

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